Acer T180

This is my office desktop system. It is a dual-core Athlon 4200+ 2.2GHz system with 560GB SATA disc (now 660GB, see below) and 2GB memory. This system was purchased in April 2007 to replace the "Time Machine".

Strangely, this system sometimes hangs when doing software installs with portage. This behaviour persisted after upgrading to KDE-4.3.3. It seems tha tKDe doesn't like emerge and the crash indicated problems with Knotify. It has also had a number of problems with SATA disks. It is also un-predictable whether a ps2 mouse or a usb mouse will work after reboot, but that might have been an error in the xorg.conf file.

Updating to KDE4

So go ahead and do "emerge --sync" and see what you get. Its also preferable to do "emerge linux-sources" and compile the kernel which is offered.

Now "emerge -uDN system" but note that a lot of things have changed. You may well get remnants of KDE-3.5 floating around in there (such as kde-base/arts-3.5 which now no longer exists, so remove arts from the /etc/make.conf file). After a bit of hunting I found a Gentoo bug report which mentioned using dev-utils/lafilefixer. Run "lafilefixer --justfixit" to get rid of any ebuild errors which refer to the no longer used .la libtool files. At this point you're also supposed to do a "revdep-rebuild", but this failed for me (it worked later after some more updates had been done).

Now you should be ready to emerge the modular xorg-x11. Actually I did all this in the wrong order, so it took several iterations. To do this it is recommende to remove the earlier version, but this is not completely necessary. So do "emerge xorg-server". Now when you try to use it you will get into a huge problem with the old drivers. This is because the ABI (Application Binding Interface) has completely changed. You will have to re-emerge all the installed drivers and driver sets, but there is no simple package ebuild to do that. You'd also better remove any you don't actually need. Fortunately you can use a trick which also does a one-shot emerge so that the drivers are not added to portage world dependency tree:

emerge $(qlist -C -I x11-drivers/) -1av

Now you should be able to start a simple X windows session.
However I ran into another problem. I had already done an emerge of kde-base/kdebase-startkde which pulled in kde-4.2.4 packages before I realised that the xorg-x11 was so different. This meant that I now had HAL installed (Linux Hardware Abstraction Layer for hotplug devices). You might not want it, but I now had it anyway. So when I started up X I had no mouse of keyboard available. Fortunately I had another PC with a working browser and found an obscure note about this issue. It can be circumvented either by using the new hal evdev drivers or by using the traditional generic mouse and kbd drivers but add the 'Option "AutoAddDevices" "false"' to the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file as follows. "man xorg.conf" explains the syntax.

"gcc-config -l" is a bit like "eselect gcc" which doesn't exist. Pick the latest version and then bootstrap, I.e. re-compile libgcc, then re-compile gcc, then re-emerge and re-compile everything else by doing "emerge -eav system" and then "emerge -eav world". Good luck!

Dual Booting with Vista

Firstly, ensure "un-born" Vista is correclty installed with no interruption. This took around 1 hour. Burning the backup CD took around 1 hour.

Secondly, you cannot re-partition a Vista disc using Linux tools. I was fortunate that on the original 160GB SATA disk Acer had created Vista boot and system partitions, but left 80GB as a data partition. Go into Vista, ensure this partition is empty and remove it. Linux can then be installed into this empty partition leaving Vista to its own devices (quite literally).

Memory Upgrade

This was a bit scary as the system refused to boot with memory from 2x different vendors, neither 3GB nor 4GB worked despite being balanced across the 4x slots. I believe other people have experienced this problem. It currently runs with 2GB memory.

Network Interface

The on-board ethernet inferface failed after a few months. This was replaced by a gbit/s card which now appears on eth2.

SATA Disk

The first 400GB SATA disk from Western Digital never worked, the system would not boot. I tested it in another system and the same problem. A second one was purchased which worked fine, but failed after approx 1 year. The system now has a 500GB WD SATA disk and an external 800GB Maxtor fireware disc for backups, which seemed like a good idea.

CPU Frequency Scaling

Yes, you can do this on a desktop PC. The BIOS does support it, but the kernel configuration needs to be set to 'powersave' rather than 'performance'. Use 'ondemand' for the 'userspace' governor and k8-powernow driver.

A useful place to look for information is /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/ where you can see the available frequencies and what driver and governor are being used by ACPI.

In addition to the kernel setting, you also need to enable the ondemand governor as follows:

emerge cpufrequtils
/usr/bin/cpufreq-set -g ondemand

The cpu frequency should now vary on demand. This system supports states of 1GHz, 1.8Gz, 2GHz and 2.2GHz.owev